Announcing The Effective Statistician Academy

Transcript

Alexander: You are listening to The Effective Statistician Podcast, the weekly podcast with Alexander and Benjamin Piske. Designed to help you reach your potential lead grade signs and serve patients without becoming overwhelmed by work. And today I have an announcement. Today is the day of the Effective Statistician Conference, and I hope you have signed up and we will see you on April 25th.

If you have missed it, don’t worry. We will have further of these conferences in the future because it was such a success just from the organization point of view, just from also registrations. As I’m recording this, it’s still 10 days to the conference and we already have nearly 550 registration, so I’m really amazed about it.

But what we will talk about today is actually the announcements that happens also at the conference, and that is, the start of The Effective Statistician Academy and what that is and how you can benefit from it, in multiple ways potentially. That’s what I’m talking about today, so stay tuned. I am producing this podcast in association with PSI a community dedicated to leading and promoting use of statistics within the healthcare industry for the benefit of patients. Join PSI today to further develop your statistical capabilities with access to the video demand content library free registration to all PSI webinars and much, much more. Head over to the PSI website at psiweb.org to learn more about PSI activities and become a PSI member today.

When you have listened to this podcast for a couple of different episodes, you probably remember what I’m talking about in the first sentence, and that is to help you as a statistician, as a data scientist, as a statistical analyst, as a quantitative researcher. In a pharma company, in a CRO, in a university, or any other healthcare setting to reach your potential and to lead great science.

Now, I believe there’s a couple of different fields that we need to be really good in, in order to reach our potential. And these are four areas. The first is leadership, and leadership is Yes, also about supervisory skills, and I’m sure at some point I’ll cover that as well. It is also about leading yourself and leading others without formal authority as a manager. We very often need to lead others when we are working in a study team, in a project team, in an initiative whatsoever? Yeah. It depends on us to convince others about new ideas, to stop them making stupid decisions and all these kind of different things. And that what it takes to be a really good statistician have cease influencing skills and I’m running the leadership program together with Gary for the effective statistician for a very long time. And we have hundreds of people who have gone through that or are currently in it, so that’s really great. Innovation is another pillar next to leadership that I think is really important.

And besides, let’s say data visualization and things like that, I haven’t been doing a lot in terms of helping you to become better in terms of understanding the latest statistical methodology and these kind of things. Of course there’s a lot of areas where you can learn about innovative things. There’s so different organizations like ASA or PSI or ESPI or you name it. What I want to do is I want to help people that have these knowledge, people that are very deep in their statistical areas that are the experts around the world. I want to help these people to reach a wider audience and help more people. It’s a lot of work to put together a good training. And usually, these people already have very good training, but it also is a lot of work to package this training together and make it available for many people and make sure that many people know about it and that many people can engage with the content. Of course there’s a place for face-to-face training. But I see that face-to-face training is also very expensive. You need to travel, you need to sleep in a hotel whatsoever. Yeah. Costs really in that area take up a lot of budget within companies, and I see that a lot of people don’t get that easy travel approval. Yeah, because there’s so much work to be done within the different companies and organizations and training budget is very often pretty tight. So I thought with this leadership program I have already built a very big platform which can be used for the leadership program, but it can also be used for many other areas for other statistical training.

And so I have connected or reached out to people that I already know that are really good in their field and that have a specific knowledge, that many of you can benefit from it, and that look, you have certain knowledge, you have the content, you have a training, probably many trainings on your hard drive. I have a platform, I have a reach, I have a teams that can help to set up these trainings. I can have a teams that helps to promote trainings to make people aware about it. I have all these systems that help you to provide training around your content in a very easy. So let’s work together. And so there’s a couple of people that says yes to it, and it’s really easy. I want to make it as easy as possible for the people that I call the experts in the field. I know from my history. When I did training, I wa just wanted to train people. I wanted to focus on content. I didn’t want to focus on setting up landing pages or doing promotion. Taking care of the software, taking care of the logistics, taking care of payments and budgets and all these kind of different things. I didn’t want to do this over the last years. That has been one of the areas where I personally learned quite a lot. And so I that I take all of these operational stuff off your plate as an expert, and you just develop your content, deliver your content, help other statistician and data scientist and so that’s how the Effective Statistician Academy evolved.

So we have now various trainings available on our homepage where you can learn from top experts in the field about their topic of expertise. So for example, there is Kaspar Rufibach, he is one of the persons that is really knowledgeable about estimands. He has been on the show before, he has been talking about savvy and different estimands. Especially in oncology where you have these treatment switchings and different exposure lengths and you have lots of intercurrent events happening and what do you do in these kind of situations? He has developed a training for estimands and we have worked together to enhance this training and add something more onto it because knowing about estimands is really great, but that’s not sufficient. You also need to convince others on using estimands you need to improve your processes. So let’s say have estimands incorporated in it. You need to have the SAPs, the protocols, the report templates, all these kind of different things. You need to take people with you with the estimands. We all know this is not a statistical topic, this is a research topic, and so we need to take all the other researchers with us, and so we have also included change management advice in this training.

Another area that we are looking into in terms of training is for example, also simulation. Simulation is a great tool that with which you can tackle lots of different complex problems. And Kim Hacquoil from Exploristics is an expert in this field. And so we have a training together that we will actually, in this case, provide live, then record, and then it will be available on the effective statistician platform.

Another topic is data visualization. We already have the data visualization training that is within the course that is about presentation and data visualization, winning with words and crafts, and now I’ve added another course that is very specifically only about tips and tricks around data visualization. We also have trainings that are, let’s say, more knowledge side because know, It’s the third pillar in terms of becoming a very good statistician. An impactful statistician, an effective statistician. Here we have also an expert like Stefan Walzer. He will speak about digital health applications and specifically digital health applications in Germany.

He has been on the show before to talk about why that is a very interesting area and why you should have a look into this. And this is not about leadership, so this is maybe also a little bit about innovation because it’s an innovative area, but it’s really. Knowing what’s going on. It’s about knowing what’s happening in the industry. It’s about knowing about the opportunities. It’s about knowing what the process looks like. So this is for me, more in this knowledge area. And the last pillar that I want to invest in, in terms of providing training for you is excellence. So leadership, innovation, knowledge and excellence are four pillars that I’m building the academy around.

Here for example, I have a course that is together with Heidi Seibold. She is an expert in reproducible research. Now, if you are in a pharma company, You think I’m mostly covered. Have a look into it, you can still learn quite a lot from it. If you are working in a university setting or any other kind of such, let’s say less corporate setting, then absolutely this course is something you really need to look into because as what I’ve seen across different academic institutions is they can really. Push the needle in terms of getting easier grants, getting better publications. Making it easier to collaborate across different institutions, but also making it easier to work within the institution within a team or if there’s a handle or these kind of things.

So check out this training by Heidi that will help you to streamline your processes, make them more robust, makes them more reproducible, and maybe even make them more transparent. And in the end, that is something where you. Trust plays a big role. And of course that also plays a big role, by the way, in pharma. Think there is some way to go to make, pharma research also more reproducible because so much things are happening behind closed doors where only, of course, regulators can check that per, let’s say the average person, someone from academia, it’s much harder to see what really went on there.

So these are a couple of examples of the Effective Statistician Academy and how it can help you to get the professional support you need to become a more effective statistician. Now, in terms of prices, there’s a variety of price points here for all these different courses. Some are small and probably very affordable. Some of course are very big, like our leadership program with a lot of group coaching and these kind of things. And of course that influences the price overall, if you want to become a trainer in the effective statistician Academy. You will of course also benefit not just from getting more exposure, becoming wire, more wider known, but also financially if you want. If you want to become a trainer, then just contact me while easiest is usually via LinkedIn. The other last bit is I really wanna focus on very high quality and high quality means for me, not just high quality content that’s clear, but also high quality delivery. I want to make it really easy to take these courses.

So most of the courses will have content that is split in digestible ways. Yeah. So for example, I avoid very long videos. I want to have these shorter so that you can train and look into these courses much more easily. Yeah it’s very difficult to find something in an hour long video, but if you have a couple of short ones, it’s much easier to find it. Also, I know from my work experience, yes. That if you’re working in a company, you very rarely have a very long open slot of a couple of hours where you can go through a training. Very often you have maybe half an hour, and if you then can watch, let’s say two shorter videos to train yourself, then that is great.

That’s overall kind of what’s happening with the effective Statistician Academy, and I’m working very hard to make that successful, to add more and more content into it. And you’ll see a lot of news around the Effective Statistician Academy ends the next week ,since next months, and hopefully ends the next years because I want this to become the area Z go-to area for high quality training. And I really wanna build a community of statisticians, data scientists, statistical analysts that all work together here to help each other become really successful. I think the more we all become more successful. The more we will increase our influence, the more we will increase the influence of statistics of data-driven decision making. And I fundamentally believe that the more we have data-driven decision making, the better we communicate data, the more we help internal and external stakeholders. Yeah. From, the researchers up to the physicians and patients that face an individual treatment decision. If all of them have better data, I think that will be for the benefit of patients.

So, check out theeffectivestatistician.com and look for the academy. Follow me on LinkedIn. You’ll get a lot of notifications there as well. And if you are not yet on my newsletter, then get there as well. Just go to theeffectivestatistician.com and subscribe there.

This show was created in association with PSI. Thanks to Reine and her team at VVS who helps with the show in the background and actually buys by also quite a lot with the academy. And thank you for listening. So head over to The Effective Statistician homepage so that you reach your potential lead great science and serve patients. Just be an effective statistician.